Pages

Men Briefly Explained

Men Briefly Explained is my new poetry collection. It explains men, briefly. You can buy Men Briefly Explained from Amazon.com as a paperback or Kindle ebook. You can also find out more about it, and buy it directly from the publisher, at the Men Briefly Explained mini-site.

Transported: now on the Kindle

Voyagers: Science Fiction Poetry from New Zealand

Voyagers won the 2010 Sir Julius Vogel Award for Best Collected Work. You can buy Voyagers from Amazon.com as a paperback or Kindle e-book. You can also find out more about Voyagers, and buy it directly from the publisher, at the Voyagers mini-site.

My Library from LibraryThing

About Me

I'm a writer, editor, anthologist, and now blogger who was born in Grimsby, Lincolnshire, England and moved to New Zealand with my family when I was 2.
I grew up on the West Coast and in Southland, then went to Dunedin to go to Otago University before moving to Wellington in 1993. I'm married with one child.
I'm juggling the writing of poetry, short fiction and novels, working part time, trying to be a good husband and father, and working hard to get New Zealand to take effective action on climate change - not to mention all the other problems the world faces. Life is busy!

29 April 2008

Transported: The Tracklisting

I came back from a few most enjoyable days in Dunedin, visiting my lovely friends there - and making some new ones - to find an advance copy of my short story collection Transported waiting for me on my return. It looks great! The cover colours, which appear slightly washed out in the image to the left, are beautifully sharp on the book itself, and so far as I can tell, all the words inside are in the right place and in the right order.

No matter how excellent the publisher - and the team at Random House NZ (who have published the book under their Vintage imprint) are indeed excellent - opening one's new book for the first time is still a nervous moment. The book doesn't go on general release until 6 June, but it's already available to pre-order at some bookshops, and publicity for it should appear shortly before it is released.

Released ... tracklisting ... yes, I think of it as something like a record (that cherishably old-fashioned artifact) with 27 tracks, some of which have already been released, in earlier versions, as singles. Here's the "tracklisting" for Transported, with links to a few previously-published stories which are available online. I hope this will whet your appetite.

That's a good rule, Helen. Kay spotted a mistake in my Earthdawn novel within five minutes - luckily, it was on the "About the author" page, not in the text of the novel itself.

I don't think we will be having a launch, and I'm OK with that - it eats up quite a lot of the promotional budget. I think launches are really important for poetry books, though - as well as being enjoyable, they can be responsible for selling a substantial proportion of the print run.

The only time I didn't have a good time in Dunedin was when I was a student living in an upstairs flat in Stuart St and I was down to seven cents in my bank account. (Mind you, a cent was worth something in those days!)